Bing Webmaster Tools is a set of free tools offered by Microsoft's Bing search engine to help website owners and webmasters optimize their sites for search engines. Similar to Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools provides insights into how Bing's search engine crawls and indexes a website. It offers various features and functionalities to assist website owners in improving their site's visibility on Bing's search results.
Key features of Bing Webmaster Tools include:
1. Site Dashboard: Provides an overview of the website's performance on Bing, including indexing status, crawl errors, and search traffic data.
2. Search Performance: Offers detailed information on how users are finding the website on Bing, including search queries, clicks, and impressions.
3. Crawl Control: Allows webmasters to control how Bingbot crawls their site, including setting crawl rates and identifying crawl issues.
4. Index Explorer: Shows a visual representation of how Bing has indexed a website, including the number of indexed pages and other relevant information.
5. Sitemaps: Enables webmasters to submit XML sitemaps to Bing, helping search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of a website.
6. Submit URLs: Allows the manual submission of individual URLs to Bing's index for faster indexing.
7. Markup Validator: Helps validate structured data markup (such as Schema.org) on web pages to enhance rich snippets in search results.
8. Backlink Data: Provides information about the inbound links to a website, helping webmasters understand their site's link profile.
9. Security Issues: Alerts webmasters to potential security issues on their site, such as malware or other security threats.
By using Bing Webmaster Tools, website owners can gain valuable insights into how Bing perceives and interacts with their site. This information can be used to optimize the site's performance on Bing's search engine, potentially improving its search rankings and visibility.